3D Printers

[ksafin]

Hey all.

Our team just got an Airwolf 3D printer thanks to one of our mentors (he's letting us use it this season).

I wanted to post to get a little bit more understanding from the CD community about the intricacies of 3D printing, and maybe an address to some of my problems.

Firstly, could you tell us a little more about the various settings in Slic3r (if you use it) and Pronterface? They're new software to us, and while we have printed a few objects out and familiarized ourselves with them, we're not experts.
(Particularly Slic3r, and the various settings from layer height, to temperatures, perimeters, etc).

I'd also really like to know about the kind of speeds we should set, which speeds (there seems to be a lot of "speed" settings in Slic3r), and what kind of speeds should we set relative to layer height (higher permissible speeds at higher layer heights, lower at lower layer heights, etc).

As for my problems.. we've tried to print out a few parts, and essentially the very bottom layers of the print are.. well.. not even remotely wholesome. They look like a pile of spaghetti rather than a solid layer of the part. This happens for the first few layers, and it appears that this is indeed a layer print of the part, not some kind of "pre-layer" to make sure future layers stick.

We want to have the entire part come out solid and perfect as it should, rather than a stringy bottom. I've posted pics below of the top and bottom of our part, maybe you'll get a gist of what I'm talking about.

Top shot of smooth(ish) layers:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/x369w14brf...2014.59.38.jpg
Bottom shot of spaghetti layers:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/04oynueg9o...2014.59.45.jpg
Side shot of increasingly better layers as we go up the z-axis:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/n8sy3gotiz...2015.00.00.jpg